Rebecca Walker Blog

I spent some time today reading Hemingway's gorgeous memoir, A Movable Feast. I breezed through it in college, really appreciating it now.

A particularly lovely paragraph:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.

With delayed publication dates the only real weapon in publishers' arsenals in fighting back against the $9.99 price point for high-profile new releases in ebook form, experimentation is getting ready to turn into policy in the year ahead. The WSJ reports that Simon & Schuster will delay ebook releases for about 35 "leading titles" early next year, and Hachette "has similar plans in the works." Meanwhile, we're aware of at least one other big six publisher contemplating the same kind of policy for the first quarter of next year.

S&S ceo Carolyn Reidy tells the Journal: "The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback. We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible."

Hachette ceo David Young adds: "We're doing this to preserve our industry. I can't sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It's about the future of the business."

In the wedding photos they wear white against the murky dark oftrees. They are thin and elegant. They have placid smiles. The mouth of the father of the bride remains in a short, straight line. I don't know who took these pictures. I suppose they are lies of sorts, revealing by omission, by indirection, by clues such as shoes and clouds. But they tell a truth, the only way lies can. The way only lies can.

Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.

"Look," he said in a loud whisper. "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman--"

At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning. But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father. He was in a dance. And he just couldn't dance." Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery."

These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts - a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster - but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try. No matter how you lick them. The envelopes will not stay glued.

Be near me now,My tormenter, my love, be near me—At this hour when night comes down,When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comesWith the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,When it comes with cries of lamentation, with laughter with songs;Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigilFor hands still enfolded in sleeves;When wine being poured makes the sound of inconsolable children who, though you try with all your heart, cannot be soothed.When whatever you want to do cannot be done,When nothing is of any use;—At this hour when night comes down,When night comes, dragging its long face, dressed in mourning,Be with me,My tormenter, my love, be near me.

The Times says the book is awful, but isn't the photo sublime. The turn of the ankle, the rich blue velvet and inscrutable face. The way the eye is drawn to Madame Chiang Kai, how she gives nothing but takes everything. Then Eleanor's distinct blend of American naivete, grit, and optimism.

Christopher Isherwood, traveling in China with W. H. Auden,
met Madame Chiang in the late 1930s. He caught her aura exactly: “She
could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike,
she could be ruthless. . . . Strangely enough, I have never heard
anybody comment on her perfume. It is the most delicious either of us
has ever smelt.”

I especially resonated with this one by Maryanne Wolf, John DiBiaggio Professor
in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and the
author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading
Brain.”

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read,
I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born
to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to
rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of
which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion
within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that.

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit”
afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold.
This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending
on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture,
motivation, educational opportunity.

Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the
particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese
reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open
architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s
developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online
reading, book, etc) emphasizes.

And that, of course, is the problem at hand. No one really knows
the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young
developing brain. We do know a great deal, however, about the formation
of what we know as the expert reading brain that most of us possess to
this point in history.

"Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without
stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole
unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep
disappointments…you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.

"Years later, when Pushkin became famous, one teacher grumbled:
“What’s all this fuss about Pushkin? He was a scamp—nothing more!”
Engelgardt, the Lycée headmaster, took an even stronger dislike to his
most famous pupil. His school report in 1816:

"Pushkin’s higher
and only goal is to shine—in poetry, to be precise, though it is
doubtful indeed he will ever succeed, because he shuns any serious
scholarship, and his mind, utterly lacking in perspicacity or depth, is
a completely superficial, frivolous French mind. And that is in fact
the best thing that can be said about Pushkin. His heart is cold and
empty: there is neither love nor religion in it. It is perhaps as
empty as ever any youth’s heart has ever been."

"Anyone who’s ever
dabbled in Zen Buddhism knows that “emptiness” can sometimes be an
achievement of the highest order. Perhaps the very “emptiness” --or
openness-- of Pushkin’s heart made it a perfect vessel for sublime
expressions of love. His “emptiness” was a treasure not to be cluttered
with skills for “the service of the state”. Already in the Lycee he had decided:

Farewell to ye, cold sciences!
I’m now from youthful games estranged!
I am a poet now; I’ve changed.
Within my soul both sounds and silence
Pour into one another, live,
In measures sweet both take and give.

Which is one reason I love Donald Crews. My son and I have just about every one of his books, and have spent many hours reading our favorites: Freight Train, Harbor, and especially Flying.

Crews is someone I've wanted to interview for years--his graphic work is that strong--and as I'm working on a book at the moment that integrates the visual arts, I sought him out.

I found him, and also the work of his daughter, Nina Crews, who is a terrific illustrator in her own right. I also found an interview with her in which she mentioned a favorite children's book that inspired her work.

It's called Nothing Ever Happens On My Block by Ellen Raskin. It was published in 1965. I immediately ordered it from Amazon. It arrived yesterday and is FANTASTIC. It's about a boy, Chester Filbert, who declares nothing ever happens on his block while a dozen fascinating stories play out behind him.

What makes the book so great, aside from its lovely, lovely design, is the way the six or seven mini-narratives unfold in the graphics behind Filbert. You have to keep going back to find the early versions of each one to follow them, which ends up feeling like a cross between a treasure hunt and reading six books in one.

GENIUS.

And that's my post for today. Even when we think nothing is going on, we are at the center of an untold number of stories. We just have to wake up to them. Then we won't be like Chester Filbert, thinking nothing ever happens when really, we are at the center of universe.

...and wondering with @JenDeaderick if, after her horrid birth experience, Betty Draper will read the Feminine Mystique, put her head in the oven or both. Which inspired the lovely JD to send me to one of Plath's many extraordinary poems: